A Woman-Child in Jamaica

By Nicole Dennis-Benn

July 30, 2016

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CreditCreditElisa Talentino

At 10 years old I was called into the living room by my mother and my grandmother. “Hurry up an’ sit, chile,” my grandmother said, her command like a hand pressed against my back, shoving me forward onto the plastic-covered sofa. After a moment of silence, my mother spoke. She told me she never again wanted to see me dancing and playing in public as I had been that morning. I was confused. I did not know that practicing my cartwheels and splits on the long veranda warranted such reprimand.

My mother had enrolled me and my little sister in dance classes and never minded our practicing before — even if we leapt into furniture or crashed into a captive audience of red hibiscus, bougainvillea, eucalyptus and ferns. Rudy, the yard man, would pause to give a brief applause before returning to whack at the weeds with his machete under the mango tree. “You’s no longah a likkle girl,” my mother explained to me, her eyes fixed on the small bumps on my chest visible in the thin blouse — two raisins that had appeared overnight.

In private I pressed hard on them, hoping they would go away. But the pain that coursed through my body would remind me that they were here to stay, and that their pending growth loomed large in the uncertainty and fear written all over my mother and my grandmother’s dark faces. “You’s ah woman like us wid breasts an’ yuh period on di way. Watch how yuh conduct yuhself in di presence of men.”

They glanced in the direction of Rudy, who whistled a mellow tune in the distance, wiping sweat off his sunburned face with the back of his hand. It was as though they felt it inevitable that someone — maybe even Rudy — would come and take the one thing they felt they had no power to protect.

I was a woman-child now. More specifically, I was a woman-child in Jamaica.

I gave up the freedom of my youth, folding myself into the starched uniform of the elite all-girls high school where I started the seventh grade. The headmistress, like my grandmother, was very strict about our wearing slips underneath our skirts, as ladies ought to. Womanhood didn’t seem so bad with our backs straight and shoulders squared as if to ward off our deepest fears and insecurities; our heads floating away from our bodies, led by our noses, heavenward.

But I would soon realize that my uniform could not protect me. This I learned one day as the sun bore down, hot and heavy, in the Half Way Tree area of Kingston. A man reached out and touched my buttocks when I walked by him in my school uniform. I sprang away too late, the touch lingering as long as the drought that year.

On my walks home from school I would get catcalls from men on the street, men in buses, or men sitting in cars groping themselves — grown men old enough to be my father, who by then was living in America.

When I’d pull away from strangers or say out loud, do not touch me! they would curse me and the people I came from, their jeers following me all the way down the sidewalk. How could they not see that I am only a girl? I would often think, enraged.

But then I remembered my mother and grandmother’s ominous voices when they called me into the living room. “You’s no longah a likkle girl. You’s ah woman like us.” If this statement were glass, I would’ve smashed it.

In a remote corner of my mind, I knew that my body was public property — no longer mine. I knew this from the crudeness of that first man’s touch — the firm, possessive grasp. I knew this from our dance hall lyrics — songs that tell our girls that something is wrong with them if they cannot perform in bed or if they resist the pain of rough penetration.

Marion Hall, a very successful female artist in Jamaica’s male-dominated dance hall sphere, rivals the men with her sexually explicit lyrics under the alias of Lady Saw. But I remember that she explained in an interview that Lady Saw was an alter ego created in part to take back ownership of her body and sexuality after being abused and raped in her youth.

The looming sense that my body was not my own was a rite of passage that made me one with the fears of my mother and grandmother; Lady Saw’s rage; and the silent hums of other Jamaican women.

I felt betrayed by my body because it dared to bloom under the eyes of predators that waited outside the schoolyard and in my community. I would crouch between the pages of books to escape into the fictional California suburbs of “Sweet Valley High” and “The Babysitters Club.” But when I looked up from the stark white pages I was back to being me, a developing girl in Jamaica.

One evening before my mother came home from work I asked my grandmother about her girlhood in Portland — a lush parish filled with banana plantations, waterfalls, caves and beaches. It so happened that there was a school trip there coming up and I wanted to know more about it. I found it strange that although my grandmother spent her childhood in Portland, we never went to visit. “Can’t stand dat place,” she’d often say, dismissive.

That evening as the sun slipped behind Kingston’s Warika Hill, she stood in the golden puddle by the kitchen sink, washing peas in a bowl. “Why you neva like Portland?” I asked her. Sighing, she lowered the bowl and stared out at the banana leaves that spied on us through the window, as if waiting to snatch the food being prepared.

The way my grandmother was staring, she might have been back to Portland in the shack where her mother — who had gotten work as a helper in Kingston — had left her in the care of another family. A shadow crossed her face. Her pose became rigid. “Is plenty woman it ’appen to,” she finally said. She spoke with resolve, after the long pause, in a voice so low that the words could have been lost by the sound of something boiling on the stove. She returned to cooking, turning on the faucet full blast.

My grandmother’s words frightened me. I was disturbed by what I understood had happened to her, and what I had begun to understand my mother and grandmother saw as the inevitable. In Jamaica, young girls often have to fight the advances of grown men who are not held accountable by the law. While some people are speaking out against it, there has been little progress made to prevent sexual violence, or even to care for survivors of sexual assault.

We are socialized as girls to watch ourselves because “men don’t know any bettah.” So we often end up blaming ourselves. We swallow our guilt in the same way we swallow our truths, failing to realize that our silence, like our mothers and grandmothers and the law, cannot protect us.